Buy a game on a digital storefront and most players assume they own it. According to reporting by Eurogamer, Mexican lawmakers now want stores to say so explicitly, one way or the other, before the checkout button gets pressed — the latest and least-covered entry in a wave of legislative pushback against games that can be switched off after purchase.

What the initiative actually proposes

The proposal comes from Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, who chairs the Mexican Senate’s Digital Rights Commission, alongside federal Deputy Iraís Reyes. Colosio Riojas outlined it in a video posted to his personal Instagram account around September 23, with Eurogamer’s write-up following less than a week later. As of publication, it hasn’t been given a formal bill name or number — it’s being described consistently as a set of proposed reforms to Mexico’s consumer-protection law, not a single named act, and it remains in the early legislative process rather than anything enacted.

The substance has three parts. First, storefronts and publishers would have to clearly disclose, before a purchase completes, whether that purchase grants outright ownership or merely a license to use the game — and if it’s a license, under what conditions that access could later be revoked. Second, for games sold under an “indefinite license” that requires ongoing server connectivity, providers would need some functional-preservation mechanism: a technical path, such as an official patch, that lets the game keep running locally if its servers are ever shut down. Third, foreign digital storefronts operating in Mexico would be required to maintain a physical local address that Mexican consumers can use to file complaints.

Part of a bigger, international pattern

None of this happens in a vacuum. It lands in the same year as the EU’s Stop Killing Games petition, which gathered enough signatures to force a formal European Commission response over games becoming permanently unplayable once publishers pull their servers, and alongside similar consumer-protection efforts introduced in California. Mexico’s initiative isn’t a formal chapter of the Stop Killing Games campaign and isn’t coordinated with it directly, but it’s aimed at the identical problem: players who paid full price discovering, sometimes years later, that what they bought was never guaranteed to keep working.

It’s also arriving at a moment when digital storefront reliability has already been making unrelated headlines. Sony-published games briefly vanished from Steam’s UK storefront earlier this month due to what the company called an error — a reminder, even when accidental, of how little control buyers actually have over whether a “purchased” game stays purchasable. A disclosure requirement like Mexico’s wouldn’t have prevented that specific incident, but it’s a symptom of the same underlying asymmetry the proposal is trying to address: storefronts can make games disappear, temporarily or permanently, and buyers currently have no reliable way to know in advance which kind of purchase they’re making.

Why it’s easy to miss, and why it matters anyway

Coverage of this specific initiative has stayed thin — outside of Eurogamer’s original report, only a handful of outlets have picked it up, and none of the major English-language gaming press beyond that initial story appears to have covered it as of this writing. That’s a modest footprint for a proposal that, if it advances, would put Mexico ahead of most of its peers in actually writing digital-ownership disclosure into consumer law rather than just responding to public petitions. The EU’s process is still working through a formal Commission response to its own petition; California’s efforts remain bills rather than law. A Mexican initiative that’s further along procedurally — even one with no name yet and no guaranteed path to passage — is worth tracking precisely because it’s had so little attention so far.

For more on how international regulators are reshaping how games get sold and accessed, see our coverage of the EU’s proposed age-verification requirements for app stores and the Steam delisting incident in the UK.